What Book to Read?

Neal Stephenson first made his mark as a writer of cyberpunk stories – a sub-genre of science fiction, set in ‘generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body’ – his best known novel of this genre being The Diamond Age (1995). But his books are incredibly diverse, as you can see from the ones I’ve reviewed before – Cryptonomicon (1999), the three volume Baroque Cycle (2003, 2004, 2004) Anathem (2008) and Reamde (2011). Of these, Anathem could probably be classified as science fiction – though of a highly philosophical kind – but the others are really adventure stories, with sometimes what Stephenson calls a ‘science fiction mind set’. Seveneves (2015) is pure science fiction – that is, an adventure story set in space. I’ve given up on the distinctions between sci fi and specualtive fiction; I just don’t know enough science to say whether, to use Margaret Atwood’s definition of speculative fiction, this book is an extension of something already underway (apart from the moon blowing up) or pure imagination which takes science beyond current knowledge.

It certainly has one of the best opening sentences I’ve read: ‘The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.’ (It joins Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me’, and Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night, ‘After killing the red haired man I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.’) At first the destruction of the moon seems merely a curiosity, but it only takes scientists a week or so to work out that it is actually an absolute disaster; the fragments of the moon will continue to disintegrate and will fall into the earth’s atmosphere, resulting not only in a destructive rain of meteorites, but in a dust cloud that will destroy the atmosphere and consequently all life on earth. They calculate that there are two years left before this happens. The only hope for a human future seems to lie in augmenting the numbers and resources – both physical and genetic – in an existing space station. The first section of the book concerns this effort. The second section traces what happens in space after the destruction of life on Earth, and the third section jumps five thousand years forward to the society that has evolved in space, and its attempt to reconstruct a ‘new’ Earth.

Like other of Stephenson’s books, this is an adventure story, or rather two adventure stories, since the third section explores necessarily different circumstances with different characters from those in the first two sections. But unlike other of his books it is pure science fiction (see, I’ve given up on the distinction) because it is about life in space and all the technology involved in space travel and survival. In addition to what might be a sufficiently challenging tale in terms of the continued existence of the human race, there is also a story of betrayal that shapes the future in a sort of ‘garden of Eden’ way. There is a matching betrayal in the third section.

Reading the first section, I found the whole idea that life on Earth had only two more years to run very scary. Stephenson, however, isn’t really much concerned about this. There is international agreement that all possible resources should be directed towards augmenting the space station, and only events that get in the way of this are much discussed. There’s some black humour about the imminent destruction – like noting that the bottom fell out of the home improvement market, and the stock exchange collapsed – but there’s little about how societies organised themselves to face annihilation. I realise that’s a different book by a different author, but I still found myself obsessing about it. There are also some broad hints about the possible survival of a couple of other groups: these are associated with characters on the space station, which is quite unrealistic, but the only way Stephenson could introduce them into a story focused on space.

I’ve said in previous posts on other of Stephenson’s books that I like the way he writes. I still do, but I’m not sure I’m so fully engaged this time. I’ve also said that he writes at such length as to be self-indulgent, and he does it here too. A lot of the detail concerns what happens in space flight, and while this is obviously important, does it have to go on at such length? Do I really need to know about zero-gravity plumbing? Delta vee? Orbital mechanics? Certainly I need to understand the problems the characters face, and the technical ones are linked to the ones Stephenson introduces as arising from human nature. But I got lost in it. I’m simply not as interested in space as he is. Furthermore, I found the conclusion surprisingly sketchy, given how much detail went before.

Being so ignorant about all this stuff, I can’t give proper credit to what is almost certainly an enormous feat of imagination. Clearly the scenario five thousand years later is pretty much all made up, extrapolating only to a minor degree from the known. There are some illustrations of what some of it looks like, which I appreciated, though since I read this on an old Kindle, they only appeared at the end. Some reviewers have also been critical of a decision Stephenson has made about the nature of his distant future characters, but I won’t spoil the story by saying what it is. It grows logically out of the plot, but I wasn’t totally convinced by some of it.

So overall, not quite the glowing endorsement I’ve given to other of Stephenson’s books. But then my level of interest in space travel can be gaged by the fact that I’ve never even seen Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica (and no doubt missed references to both). If you’re a science fiction fan, you may well like it. And Stephenson fans are happy to read whatever he writes. You can find more about him and his work here.  The web-site has technical drawings and other goodies for those so inclined. I’ll certainly read whatever he writes next.